Blacks and Women, What if I am Both?

By Wang Xiao Song

You can always tell when my personal life is in turmoil because
there will be very few posts. But then again, I blog through crisis as well.

I guess it cuts both ways. First, my internet was down last weekend.
Then, the Barnes and Noble didn't have lap top plug. Finally, on Sunday,

SJ told me he got (post holiday) cold feet.

Then I started trippin' off the fact that my sister, for some reason,
thought that because we were living in the same state that I should
feel obligated to to kick it with her on Christmas. Did i mention
that I have not rocked with her since Clinton was president. Man.

That girl needs a 12 step program and Jesus before I f*ck with her.
She and our momma got funk that predates my existence on earth.
I am not touching that with a ten foot pole.

The good news is that my old school homie, d-shot contacted me
and we ironed some '03 funk out and have re-connected.
It's weird with those historical friendships. Its like, you want
to be cool with the person again, but sometimes the moment has passed.
With her, I feel like I made the right choice. She sounded the same,
and seemed happy to hear from me.


I felt compelled to post this morning, before I went to Glide, when I read this
article in The Times about Race and Gender in the presidential election.
Sentences like this, on the history of Voting Rights for White women and
Black people, make me feel so invisible it ain't even funny.
Of course the authors have no idea.

“The movements have been so deeply linked, and usually in harmony,” said Sara Evans, author of “Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left” and a historian at the University of Minnesota. “But there will always be points of tension, too,” Ms. Evans said, especially when the broad ideals that blacks and women have typically shared — in their fight for the vote, non-discrimination and economic equality — give way to the nitty-gritty of reaching consensus, setting policy, passing legislation and, in the case of elections, making choices

What the highlighted fragment really means is WHITE women and
Black people, but they expect us to make the inference.
The problem that I have with it is that language reflects
the accepted notion that this issue is ABOUT Black men
and White women, that is if you let the media and the academic's
tell it, it is. I can't help but read that and think,
well what if I am apart of both groups?
According to this article, that overlap is irrelevant.


The article does a interesting job contextualizing this history of
the abolitionist movement/Voters rights movement.
Peep the dialog between Candy Stanton and Fredrick Douglas.

During a heated meeting in New York City’s Steinway Hall in 1869, Stanton wondered, “Shall American statesmen ... so amend their constitutions as to make their wives and mothers the political inferiors of unlettered and unwashed ditch-diggers, bootblacks, butchers and barbers, fresh from the slave plantations of the South?” At which point, Douglass rose, paid tribute to Stanton’s years of work on civil rights for all, and replied, “When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung from lampposts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and rage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down... then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.”

Fredrick Douglas, go hard, hunh?

How come the two movements were unable to see that it was
only together that they would win?

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When you fall out with your old school homies,
do you leave the door for re-entry wide open or a little cracked?

Why do n*ggas get cold feet?

Why didn't the abolitionist and the womens rights cats continue to
work together?
Did they not receive the Willie Lynch memo?

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